This lecture was filmed at the 2017 National Math Festival in Washington, D.C. and features Dr. Stephon Alexander of Brown University.
Join physicist and musician Dr. Stephon Alexander as he shares his personal journey as both cosmologist and jazz performer. You won’t want to miss his jazz saxophone solo, either! His recent book The Jazz of Physics—full of provocative, impressionistic vignettes—explores how physics and music are interwoven both in his own life story and in the way the universe works.
Physicist and musician Stephon Alexander has straddled the two worlds of theoretical physics and jazz music over the last two decades. He obtained his doctorate from Brown University and was a research physicist at Imperial College, London and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University. On the physics front, Alexander works on the connection between the smallest and largest entities in the universe pushing Einstein’s theory of curved space-time to extremes, beyond the big bang with sub atomic phenomena. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of inflation based on higher dimensional hypersurfaces in string theory called D-Branes. In such models the early universe emerged from the destruction of a higher dimensional D-brane which ignites a period of rapid expansion of space often referred to as cosmic inflation. Learn more at stephonalexander.org.
nationalmathfestival.org
